To remedy the situation, Picciolo said that digital TV customers would be given credit for the cost of an On Demand movie once purchased, while analog customers would receive a $5 gift card. No customer action would be required.

"We didn't live up to our standards for a quality customer experience," Picciolo said. "We know there's no way to undo the inconvenience of last night's outage, and we want them to know how truly sorry we are for this issue."

The unexpected blackout came at approximately 4:45 p.m. PT/7:45 p.m. ET Sunday afternoon during a commercial break in the second quarter of the Seattle Seahawks-Denver Broncos matchup, just before halftime. The issue was not resolved until more than an hour later, at approximately 5:56 p.m. PT/8:56 p.m. ET, when the game was in the middle of the third quarter.

"We have resolved a technical issue with the SD signal and apologize for the inconvenience to our customers," a Time Warner Cable spokesperson said in a statement Sunday evening to The Hollywood Reporter.

Customers flooded Twitter with angry responses to the glitch, with the problem affecting the standard-definition feed, though not the high-definition channel. Customer service lines also were dealing with an unusually high volume of calls due to the regional problem.